One week after I arrived in Shanghai, to live, which is a long story in itself, I got a call from a friend inviting me to cover Norway’s Oyafestivalen for whichever Australian music outlets I was writing for. Considering I wasn’t even in the country that meant a few very quick phone calls, and ultimately a review, interviews with Shining, Datarock and this one with Subs (originally published in Nylon, but that’s since folded).

One! No money
Two! No family
Three! No job
Four! No future

Five-foot Kang Mao (above, centre) explodes from the tiny stage at the Last Train bar in downtown Oslo; her short black bob whips around her head as she screams out the words. The tiny New York-style bar is packed way past capacity with music heavyweights from across the globe, some intrigued by the idea of Chinese punk rock, but most excited by the rumours of Subs’ exhilarating live show.

The Ramones-esque Beijing quartet belt out a fiery blend of hardcore punk, rockabilly and heavy ’70s rock.

“Until 1995, China didn’t have punk,” says Kang Mao, speaking dialectical Mandarin spiced with bits of English through an interpreter. There were so few people that liked punk,” she continues, “particularly in our city Wuhan, so, of course, you knew everybody.”

Guns’n'Roses, Bon Jovi and Michael Jackson CDs were readily available, but she bonded with guitarist Wu Hao, drummer Ah-Dong and bass player Zhu Lei over Nirvana, Fugazi and Alice in Chains CDs that arrived as what the Chinese call “dakou”.

“Basically, you look at the spine of these dakou CDs and there’s a strip missing,” says the diminutive punk, “like someone took a blade saw and just went zzzt.” Record labels across the world cut a notch from the plastic case of surplus CDs, marking them as ‘remainders’ to be sold cheaply or destroyed. Thousands wound up in Chinese garbage dumps and China’s alternative record stalls and, Kang Mao says, without these “dirt cheap CDs, there’s no way we would be here, they were the primary source of music for us.”

But although music was leaking into the country, it was still tough to find instruments, and tougher still learning to play them. High quality instruments were extremely rare, and cheap instruments were out of the range of poor punk kids. A friend of Kang Mao’s bought an electric guitar because he wanted to play punk rock. He got the guitar home and couldn’t understand why it was so much quieter than his favourite CDs. Kang Mao giggles explaining he hadn’t bought an amplifier. “There really was no institutional way of finding out what a guitar is or what it could do,” she says. “We didn’t know you had to put the effects box into the wire and the other effects box into the guitar, the electric guitar into the amplifier.”

Their new demo album, follow up to the debut Subs Life EP, captures all the ferocity of Kang Mao’s voice, with a tougher rockabilly nod to Jon Spencer’s Blues Explosion.”There’s a lot of different things going on in each piece,” Kang Mao says. “We don’t want to spend time talking about what we’re not satisfied with, I mean there’s a lot of stuff that we’re excited about and we want that to come out too. There’s hatred, but there is also excitement and happy so fine emotions running into each song.”

Desperate the frustration that obviously underlines Subs’ songs, there is also a lot of mischievous fun. Ah-Dong says drily, “Well look the woman’s angry, but the three of us are having a good time.”

Here’s their manager, Jon Campbell (pictured, left) on Subs for his column at Pop Matters.

LISTEN:
Subs - 8 O’Clock
More Subs songs at Pure Volume.